skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I don't understand most of the technical details of Apple's blog post"

I do:

- Client side vectorization: the photo is processed locally, preparing a non-reversible vector representation before sending (think semantic hash).

- Differential privacy: a decent amount of noise is added the the vector before sending it. Enough to make it impossible to reverse lookup the vector. The noise level here is ε = 0.8, which is quite good privacy.

- OHTTP relay: it's sent through a 3rd party so Apple never knows your IP address. The contents are encrypted so the 3rd party never doesn't learn anything either (some risk of exposing "IP X is an apple photos user", but nothing about the content of the library).

- Homomorphic encryption: The lookup work is performed on server with encrypted data. Apple can't decrypt the vector contents, or response contents. Only the client can decrypt the result of the lookup.

This is what a good privacy story looks like. Multiple levels of privacy security, when any one of the latter 3 should be enough alone to protect privacy.

"It ought to be up to the individual user to decide their own tolerance for the risk of privacy violations." -> The author themselves looks to be an Apple security researcher, and are saying they can't make an informed choice here.

I'm not sure what the right call is here. But the conclusion "Thus, the only way to guarantee computing privacy is to not send data off the device." isn't true. There are other tools to provide privacy (DP, homomorphic encryption), while also using services. They are immensely complicated, and user's can't realistically evaluate risk. But if you want features that require larger-than-disk datasets, or frequently changing content, you need tools like this.
Have you seen tantivy-cli [1]? It builds and uses an on disk index, which you can store separately (i.e. data on NAS, index locally).

[1] https://github.com/quickwit-oss/tantivy-cli
This is such a weird article. It reads like a 3000 word lament for the death of video stores, down to a coda about how Reed Hastings fabricated the story about the Apollo 13 late fee that triggered him to start Netflix in the first place. Why would I care if that story was false? Video stores were bad. Multi-month theatrical release windows are bad. The studio system was bad. Things are better now.

In all these kinds of stories that revolve around how much crap there is on Netflix, there are two things you have to keep in mind:

* Netflix didn't invent shlock and probably didn't even accelerate it; if anything, Netflix probably reversed the trend away from scripted and towards "reality".

* What distinguishes Netflix more than anything else is its efficiency getting content to viewers, which means that there's more of everything on Netflix, and in its catalog of originals. There's more schlock, which is very noticeable, and, compared to pre-Netflix-streaming outputs of places like HBO, also more solid original films. But 99% of everything is crap, so if the only way you have to engage with the Netflix catalog is browsing their interface, that's most of what you're going to see.
> Sound familiar from a modern take?

I am not sure what you're referring to but I remember watching an episode of some fictional show on Netflix where this method was used. Where a couple would count their fingers throughout the day so they could dream lucidly together.

If I'd have to guess I think it was "Behind Her Eyes".
This portrait is so stunning it's news. Art defines our world today as well as any other kind of news. As hackers we must understand our world to place ourselves in it. Otherwise our career is without a soul. This is already a strong tendency today, one that we must reject.
Really enjoy this curveball you threw, casts this whole conversation in a new light doesn't it?

It is true that a lot of old plays, operas etc do exactly what Netflix is accused of here. What is a monologue? Was Shakespeare guilty of creating casual viewing content when he wrote Hamlet's monologue? Shouldn't he have just showed Hamlet's ambivalence???
That's not entirely accurate. In the US, computer-generated code can be copyrighted. The key point is that copyright protection extends to the original expression in the code, but not to its functional aspects, such as algorithms, system design, or logic.
There’s no point in continuing the discussion, since the current status quo is silly laws - see sibling post who leaves their property vacant.
They hit the right combo of cheap ($€), accessible (you can buy them everywhere, shipped everywhere, even in quantities of 1), easy to use hardware (they're sold on many different 'breakout boards' with usb connectors for power and programming and marked pins), easy to use software (documentation, examples, arduino ide, nodemcu) and without any weird limits licencing wise.

Arduino was similar at first, but stayed on low-performance avr chips for way too long and non-chinese ones were expensive (and well, no wifi), rpi pico has some nice features, but much harder to get at first, and everything else is a "raw chip" bought on sites like digikey, with expensive shipping, 600+ pages of documentation, 300+ of them needed to send a first ping, you need to solder them onto a board and programming usually requires some expensive rig.
I don't believe for a second that AI is the reason. In anything, AI has contributed to added jobs, or at the minimum a shift in resources toward AI.
It's a highly disturbing sign of the times that "this is just communism" no longer works universally as an argument. That it needs to be qualified now, suddendly, even here on a forum for startups -- even though almost everybody over the age of 30 knows it does not work like they know that the sun rises in the morning.

Of course, it's no less alarming that there's also a growing population who is incapable of understanding "that's nazism dude, don't do that".
https://www.pqconnect.net/user.html
Hate to be political here, but anyone that is on this boat and is left-leaning got a taste of their own medicine
I'm using it for about two years and i haven't seen any sloppification. I see it as a feature that it is a paid service because i hope it will be a sustainable model for them to keep it as it is. I think it's a no brainer to pay for it instead of all the suffering people describe here. The founder remark i don't get
I think these are businesses development directions everyone talks about but are almost guaranteed to be a flop for any company that isn't already known in them. A few years ago everyone talked about big data hires even if they had about a GB of relevant data.
> The kicker? These are 100% remote jobs - the interviews are being performed at shared workspaces. That's the world we live in now.

Nah, if I was running a 100% remote job company ten years ago before all of this, I would still absolutely want to meet each of my hires in person before inking a deal. Maybe I'm old-school but I've been very successful and lucky with hiring.
Tbh I used to have an issue with that but these days it really is a small issue in the grand scheme of things. You can say No but also, there are larger systemic problems in science.
I'm not sure if the upload part works, but once it's uploaded it plays just fine.
International politics is not a war of all against all. It's more like a pre-state society governed by informal norms and expectations and personal relationships between the elites.

People like predictable rules. If the big guy says that the seas are open and they are open, you will probably support the rule, because it allows you to focus more on trade and less on protecting your interests by force. But if the seas are open, except for those the big guy doesn't like, then you may start wondering if you'll also end up on that list.

Big guys also try to enforce the rules. If piracy or an unjustified blockade threatens the freedom of navigation, naval powers will try to restore the status quo.

Reciprocity is an important norm in international politics. It makes things a bit like a mix of little kids arguing and common law. The key principle is that if the big guy and his friends area allowed to do X for their reasons, it sets the precedent that you are allowed to do what you consider the equivalent of X for your reasons. Either the big guy follows his own rules, or everyone is allowed to use their own judgment to break the rules. But if a random nobody breaks the rules, it doesn't set the precedent in the same way.
I am speaking from personal experience. there may not be a shortage of landlords somewhere (say ATL where rental properties have been fully taken over by large corps) but this isn’t true on the whole. additionally, even if there isn’t a shortage of landlords the prices are skyhigh pricing out large percentage of population, especially in urban areas
The longest period of unemployment I've ever experienced ended about 6 months ago. I was unemployed for 11 months. The company that finally hired me was intentionally targeting people with lots of experience. I have that. They also pay less than I used to make but I took it because I needed a job.

Previous to that period of unemployment, my resume tended to get noticed. I got interviews from 3 applications out of 5. But this time, it was 3 out of 150.

Read that last paragraph again. My resume has not gotten worse. I still have decades of experience, a master's degree and a bunch of patents. That used to count for something.

My conclusion is that the market has gotten much worse for people with experience who don't hide being white and male.
Kinesis makes regular layout split keyboards.
What would you suggest instead? I also thinking about.
> we're not the real customers any more.

Were we ever? I didn’t pay for search. I don’t pay for email.
They do, as "analog" - but it's more of a brush off than any real discussion. What they didn't really talk about at all is firmware, which seems like a big omission...
"homomorphic encryption and differential privacy"

It is new. It is fancy. It is not clear where HE/DP is being used, it depends if the code is written using the Swift toolkit, but even that has paths for exfiltration if used incorrectly. They claim they are using DP in Photos as stated in the article here:

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/scenes-differenti...

But the fact remains they are looking at your pictures. I do not trust them for one fleeting fart in the wind on this. Think about it for a hot second: HE/DP allows you to perform operations on the data without knowing the data, but what if someone goofs an operation and it ends up returning the actual data?

Sorry, not buying it. Crypto is hard to get right, and when it is monetized like this for "new features", it is wildly unnecessary and exposes users to more risk.
The "original windows" in this context are windows 700 years newer than Notre Dame that were themselves part of a significant modernisation, and only a small part of the windows of Notre Dame (about 5% of the windows are being replaced).

The replacement windows are also made by a studio that has a history going back way past the windows being replaced, and a history specifically of restoring historic glass - I very much doubt they'll need replacement within 20-30 years.

The gradual renewal over centuries of renovations and restorations is itself part of the historic legacy of Notre Dame.
Remote work couldn't have solved anything. It's a great option for some people but it can only ever be possible for a tiny fraction of jobs where everything is done online. So basically nothing in agriculture, mining, construction, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, military, transportation, utilities, tourism, hospitality, primary education, sports, etc. Even in the tech industry a lot of employees will always have to at least occasionally work at a certain physical office in order to access specialized or security controlled hardware.
> But to your other point, I think any perceived layoffs of white males at tech companies is just correlation with their overrepresentation in the software engineer population.

Agreed. A friend interviewed at Stripe in 2019 (ish, but before the pandemic) and he said every single person he saw at their SF office was 25-30 and white male. And it wasn't a small building and he was given a tour of a good bit of it.
Kinesis generally makes good stuff, and this one has normal cherry MX switches so you've got access to nearly any keycap you want: https://kinesis-ergo.com/shop/freestyle-pro/
A shortage of landlords is not possible - the properties scale with management the way construction happens in the USA

There could be a shortage of rental property - oh that’s exactly what the article is talking about.
"I wish articles like this had more examples in them."

There is a class of things that don't fit in blogs very well, because any example that fits in a blog must be broken some other way to fit into a blog, and then you just get a whole bunch of comments about how the example isn't right because of this and that and the other thing.

It's also a problem because the utility of an abstraction depends on the context. Let me give an example. Let us suppose you have some bespoke appliance and you need to provide the ability for your customer to back things up off of it.

You can write a glorious backup framework capable of backing up multiple different kinds of things. It enforces validity checks, slots everything nicely into a .zip file, handles streaming out the backup so you don't have to generate everything on disk, has metadata for independent versions for all the components and the ability to declare how to "upgrade" old components (and maybe even downgrade them), support for independent testing of each component, and has every other bell and whistle you can think of. It's based on inheritance OO and so you subclass a template class to fill out the individual bit and it comes with a hierarchy pre-built for things like "execute this program and take the output as backup" and an entire branch for SQL stuff, and so on.

Is this a good abstraction?

To which the answer is, insufficient information.

If the appliance has two things to backup, like, a small SQL database and a few dozen kilobytes of some other files, such that the streaming is never useful because it never exceeds a couple of megabytes, this is an atrocious backup abstraction. If you have good reason to believe it's not likely to ever be much more than that, just write straight-line code that says what to do and does it. Jamming that into the aforementioned abstraction is a terrible thing, turning straight code into a maze of indirection and implicit resolution and a whole bunch of code that nobody is going to want to learn about or touch.

On the other hand, if you've got a dozen things to backup, and every few months another one is added, sometimes one is removed, you have meaningful version revs on the components, you're backing up a quantity of data that perhaps isn't practical to have entirely in memory or entirely on disk before shipping it out, if you're using all that capability... then it's a fantastic abstraction. Technically, it's still a lot of indirection and implicit resolution, but now, compared to "straight line" code that tries to do all of this in a hypothetical big pile of spaghetti, with redundancies, idiosyncracies of various implementations, etc., it's a huge net gain.

I don't know that there's a lot of abstractions in the world that are simply bad. Yeah, some, because not everything is good. But I think they are greatly outnumbered by places where people use rather powerful, massive abstractions meant to do dozens or hundreds of things, for two things. Or one thing. Or in the worst case, for no things at all, simply because it's "best practices" to put this particular abstraction in, or it came with the skeleton and was never removed, or something.
That doesn’t make sense - a sick patient costs the shareholders money.
The sinister, malicious plot to change all the stained glass windows to other, different windows.
The weird part is that your response to being ignored as a unique person is to treat companies as though they are all exactly the same. The relationship is not assymetrical. I also wonder whether the signals we interpret from the application process have much correlation with whether the job is actually worthwhile?
Great point, and agree that generalization makes for the clearest wins from abstraction.

But there are also cases where there is no generalization, but the encapsulation / detail hiding is worthwhile. If you have a big function and in the middle of it you need to sort some numbers, you would probably implement a Sort routine to make the control flow much easier to understand - even if you only use the function once (let’s pretend there’s no sort functionality in standard library).

Curious if others agree, and what heuristics you use to decide when implementation encapsulation is worthwhile.
I think it's not so much groupthink, but rather that those institutions feel the need to make themselves look important and essential to the sport, instead of being there to facilitate the sport.
"This promotional period will end February 8, 2025."

The real cost of LLMs remains an
open question --- answer to be revealed later.
You're not wrong, but IME, if people are doing stuff like that, it's not something an IDE or lack thereof would solve anyway. Sometimes you just have to either train/mentor or (if unresponsive) fire people who write such primitively bad code.
Not all queries are the same but I agree with you that the authority of source is crucial. That's why for example .gov sites rank high and should rank high because government is usually the most trusted source.

But when you are looking for new shoes to buy or food recipes then .gov sites can't help you and that's where things get ugly....SEO spam ugly.
It turns out that work-remotely can be done by non-US based workers for a fraction of the cost of US workers.

So those lobbying for work-from-home, well, this is the natural endpoint of that.
Success of the US is largely a product of globalization and geography. The US would be nowhere close to where it is now without largely unrestricted capitalism and a global consumer base. It has always been like that, from being a colony, through making money on products of slavery, being industrial base for lots of the world in 20th century and now being the digital world capital.
that is an oxymoron - america has been the main driver of globalization without a distant second. the “america first” is political garbage used to rile up rural america, it only exists in context “we’ll let american companies do whatever is necessary so that we keep being “global leader” …)
I remember going to the physical cinema one day to see "Air". I didn't think the movie was that great, and I wonder if the "Amazon Studios" logo at the beginning made me more critical.
I'd like to hear the plan in the event of an orbital nuke designed to take out LEO constellations. Space internet doesn't seem like a great backup plan imho
It's a chess match, not a fashion show, and that's a good thing because I don't look at a room full of chess GM's and think, "Now those guys get fashion." I think, "Somewhere a library is missing its librarian."
I probably wouldn't use an alternative launcher with those caveats attached. It seems the awkward animation thing may be a consequence of an Android security feature:

> Why is the recent screen buggy?

> Unfortunately, it is because the system launcher handles the Recents screen. Therefore, if you change the default launcher, weird things can happen [...] The only way to fix this is by having a Magisk module called QuickSwitch.

https://lawnchair.app/faq/#why-is-the-recent-screen-buggy

(Can't vouch for the accuracy of this information as of $CURRENT_ANDROID_VERSION.)
NATO without the US still has two member countries with nukes. That doesn't guarantee "NATO wins" but it does assure "Russia loses" if that particular cat comes out of the bag.
It is literally the filling of the soul's heart with God's holy light (Nur), attached magnetically to the Word of Faith in its center. The lights come with our every repetition of whichever Holy Name we repeat (in whichever language is best for us), as in the Lord's Prayer:

Hallowed be Thy Name

See, all of God is Holy, for sure, but Its many Names are specifically used to beckon God to send Its Nur to our heart to help transmute our heart's 19 vices into their corresponding virtue, as everything in the universe is created in pairs, or within a polarity.

We are not repeating any mantra or Holy Name of God for Its benefit, for It can gain nothing from a mote like ourselves, but the system, like all of creation, is created for our benefit. Zikr (repetition of any such Name) is the highest form of religious practice we human beings can perform, because it is the call part of the call-and-response that brings those Nurs to our heart, once we begin the journey to Faith.

The journey to Faith begins with a heartfelt prayer to God to make you Its servant, instead of the selfish, ignorant person we are born as -- and we all are, I promise you, at least at the start, depending on our cultures, though not completely or wholly without virtue. The most effective such prayer is mentioned in the 1st Beatitude:

Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven

One can pray, "Lord, I beg You to take my Spirit back unto Yourself so that I may cleanse and purify my soul of its vices, replacing them with their corresponding virtue."

That prayer -- or some other heartfelt beseeching of God for help to self-tranform -- embarks one upon the Path of Love, which guides one to their path and associated Teacher, who will be revealed in a dream. This process is called Hidayat in the Quran.

It happened for outstanding poet, Prof. Coleman Barks, the most important translator and populariser of the poems of Rumi. I highly suggest finding his YouTube video titled, "Rumi and the Play of Poetry", where he recites both Rumi's and some of his own poems to musical accompaniment.

Peace be with you. We love you. Love and seek the truth, and you will learn the importance of love, and creating happiness will be your joy and destiny.
I appreciate the explanation. However, I think you do not address the main problem, which is that my data is being sent off my device by default and without any (reasonable) notice. Many users may agree to such a feature (as you say, it may be very secure), but to assume that everyone ought to be opted in by default is the issue.
Even that seems high. I don’t feel good with 200mg per human, not per kilo. I can’t imagine drinking ten times as much and not being in the ER. A hundred times that much? No fucking way.
Ask HN: USA to Europe
I’ve hit a breaking point where I’ve decided I no longer want to live and work in the United States. I would like to begin searching for a suitable place to live and pursue citizenship in the EU, and am wondering if anyone here is in a similar boat or has already done this and can share some insight into your experience.

The main reason I want to leave is it’s just exhausting being here, especially in the Silicon Valley area where I live and work currently. Now more than ever it really does feel like late stage capitalism here. It doesn’t seem like this country makes anything of value anymore, especially with all the AI hype everyone’s main goal seems to be to do the least amount of work, for the cheapest price, and then dump the result on someone else to cash out as quickly as possible. It’s embarrassing.

As I get older, it’s more important to me to have balance in my life and enjoy the time I have here than it is to fulfill my capitalistic duty of working my fingers to the bone until I’m 68 years old and given the privilege to retire. It’s not that I don’t want to work, I just don’t want to have work be the center of everything I do, and Europe generally seems to have a better culture around this from what I can tell. I am completely ok with not making nearly as much money as I do now in exchange for living a simpler life.